General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

A Simple Murder

A Simple Murder is a 2020 Hindi-language dark comedy crime thriller web series directed by Sachin Pathak and streamed as a SonyLIV Original. Its seven-episode first season premiered on 20 November 2020.¹ The story follows Manish, a failed entrepreneur who, through a case of mistaken identity, receives a contract killing assignment with an advance of five lakh rupees, and the chain of greed-driven consequences that follows.²

Key fact	Detail
Platform and premiere	SonyLIV Original, 20 November 2020, seven episodes¹
Genre	Dark comedy, crime thriller¹
Director and writers	Sachin Pathak; written by Akhilesh Jaiswal and Prateek Payodhi³
Production	JAR Pictures, its third web production after Rangbaaz (2018) and The Final Call (2019)⁴
Lead cast	Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub (Manish), Priya Anand (Richa), Amit Sial (Santosh), Sushant Singh (Himmat)⁵
IMDb rating	6.9/10 from about 4,200 user ratings⁶
Filming	41 days during the COVID-19 pandemic, in Hyderabad, Amritsar, and Delhi⁷

Spoilers

Premise

Manish (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) is a middle-class Delhi man struggling to save a failing marriage and waiting for his start-up ambitions to take off while his wife Richa (Priya Anand) grows impatient for money.¹ While hunting for an investor for his business idea, he knocks on the wrong door and finds himself involved in a case of mistaken identity, ending up with a contract to kill a young girl, the daughter of an influential politician with his eyes on the Hoshiarpur ticket, along with an advance of five lakh rupees.² The murder goes wrong, and Manish acquires a nemesis in Santosh (Amit Sial), who sets out to avenge his girlfriend's death.⁷

The series braids together several storylines: Manish and Richa; Richa's lover Rahul (Ayaz Khan); the contract-killer network run by Pandit (Yashpal Sharma), whose roster includes Santosh and the ghazal-reciting hitman Himmat (Sushant Singh); and a young inter-religion couple on the run from her furious politician father.⁸ Two Delhi police officers, Inspector Amit Mehta (Gopal Datt) and his sharper deputy Sub Inspector Pratik (Vikram Kochhar), enter the crowded scene once the bodies start piling up, and Vijay Raaz serves as narrator.⁵^•⁹

Production

JAR Pictures, the production company behind the ZEE5 shows Rangbaaz (2018) and The Final Call (2019), produced the series as its third web project, with Ajay Rai as producer.⁴ Shooting began in July 2020 at Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad, one of the first Hindi productions to resume during the pandemic lockdown.⁴ Director Sachin Pathak, who had previously directed the ZEE5 series Rangbaaz Phirse, said the unit completed 41 days of shooting following safety guidelines in Hyderabad, Amritsar, and Delhi.⁷

The screenplay is credited to Akhilesh Jaiswal, known for Gangs of Wasseypur and Mastram, and Prateek Payodhi.⁴^•³ Karsh Kale composed the music and S Bharathwaaj handled cinematography.¹⁰ SonyLIV positioned the series as a follow-up to the success of Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story earlier in 2020; Saugata Mukherjee, the platform's head of original content, described dark comedy as a genre that was largely underserved on Indian OTT platforms and named A Simple Murder the service's second offering in that space after Kadakh.¹

Reception

Critical response was divided. Shubhra Gupta of The Indian Express praised the series for nailing its serio-comic tone, singling out Sushant Singh as a killer who is also a closet poet and the West Delhi locations of Dwarka, Janakpuri, and Mayapuri, while noting a few pacing problems.⁸ A review in The New Indian Express called it an effective dark comedy carried by consistently good performances, brazen violence, and non-judgmental writing, though it found the tonal shift into the Hindu-Muslim storyline jarring.¹¹ Scroll.in found the show repetitive by design and unevenly paced but credited its seasoned cast, while criticizing the writing for laying most of the blame on Priya Anand's character Richa.⁹ The Times of India gave the season a critic's rating of 2.5 out of 5, calling it unnecessarily complex, and Film Companion described it as a dry, done-to-death black comedy whose seven-episode length strained its cinema of eccentricity.¹²^•¹³

Audience measures were middling. The series holds an IMDb rating of 6.9/10 from about 4,200 users, with individual episode ratings declining from 6.3 for the first episode to 5.8 for the seventh.⁶ India Today included it in a December 2020 roundup of under-hyped Hindi web series of the year, calling it a gripping dark comedy with an unconventional, absurdist approach.¹⁴ As of late 2026 the series remains streamable on SonyLIV in India.⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Indian and South Asian web series

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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